Wild West. Wild East.

Take me to Thimphu.

It’s Wild West here. But Billy the Kid would be a bodhisattva. Wyatt Earp a monk garbed in deep maroon. Buffalo Bill would have to trade his moniker to Takin Bill, the mountain beast—part cow, part goat, part water-buffalo—that I’d have thought was a myth had I not seen it with my own eyes. Trade six-shooters for prayer beads and mani. Trade dusters for the traditional dress of ghos and kiras. Trade bandoleers for kabnay, honorary sashes. Trade spittin’ tobaccy for betel nut and lime. But keep that undercurrent of wildness: the feral dogs, the hard looks to strangers; keep the spittin’ on the streets, and that sour market smell; keep the gathering of men with an air of trouble about ‘em; keep the drunken and querulous; keep the coquettish glances; keep that dust blowin’ through town, keep that middle-of-nowhere adventure feeling, that indigenous feeling; keep the cacophony, the immensity, the isolation. And picture it all happening in a mountain town gone loco.

Yeah, you’re gettin’ it, partner.

But there is so much more.

Half the roads are paved in this capital city. They’ve got fresh paint down and road signs written in Dzongkha. There is not a traffic light to be seen (in the whole country I’m told), rather an officer in something like a gazebo, directing traffic with wild gestures. The other half of the roads are packed dirt, erratically cobbled with stones once buried deep beneath these towering Himalayas. There is refuse congesting the walkways, heaps of it piled together and set alight. The conflagrations are toys for smiling, ash varnished kids, meeting grounds for groups of men, a romantic stop for couples headed up Lover’s Lane.

The Bhutanese are a beautiful people, swarthy and rosy-cheeked. What is that face? Some deeply hidden beauty, some mountain hermit beauty. Can’t get a handle on it; I have not seen a people like this before. Smiles are abundant, stained red with doma, many a missing tooth. Often the elderly gaze up at me with vitreous cataracts, unblinking. There are deep crevasses that carve their faces. That great sculptor known as Time has added lines to the crow’s feet around their eyes, built up scar tissue, folded in wrinkles to make fine layers of parchment skin. These faces are not like Time’s other works of art—those pretty, young faces with nary a crease in them, which are also abundant here. No, the faces that are cracked, withering and delicate, painstakingly detailed, those are the masterpieces, Time’s lifework reaching the height perfection. Beautiful.

Where the takin run wild.

It ain’t all National Geographic though, partner. There are punks with stringently coiffed hairdos, wearing studded leather jackets and skinny jeans. There are girls checking themselves out on their smartphones, primping and preening, pushing up cleavage and verifying the effect. There are gangs of boys smoking like chimneys, blatantly defying the nationwide anti-tobacco laws. There are businessmen in suits, and immigrants from India and Nepal loitering in front of construction sites, and children with their mothers out shopping for the day. Kiosk attendants look bored. Police officers intimidate. Homeless beg on the street.

It’s all going on here in Thimphu.

Not a tourist to be seen though. Just as you didn’t get camera toting, pasty white lookyloos in the dank saloons of the West, it’s hard to find a foreigner here. I walked the length of the city and didn’t see a single chillup until getting back to my hotel and rejoining the group. Capital cities like these are hard to find.

The nearby peaks are fresh with light snow. The behemoths to the north cannot be seen from my spot in the city, but the feeling of immensity persists. Forest is abundant.

Thimphu would be a beautiful city to stay in, but I am headed to The East, where, if the tales are true, it just gets wilder.

My group received a medical briefing from a resident doctor and the director of the program that brought me here. One story they recounted about The East went like this:

“A boy from one of the villages was on his way home for vacation from boarding school. He was on a path he always walked and knew well. Close to his home, a group of wild boar ran across the trail, very near to the boy. He stopped, scared by the boars. But then he saw that behind the boars a leopard was in pursuit. The leopard stopped on the path, distracted now by the boy, a much easier meal. It pursued the boy. It swiped at him and the claws caught the boy’s face and tore out an eye. The boy played dead and soon the leopard left him. The boy arose, took up his eye from the ground and ran home. His mother fainted when she saw the disfigured boy, so the boy had to run to his neighbor’s house. The neighbor eventually took him to the hospital, though they couldn’t save the boy’s eye.”

Such is a story from The East.

If that isn’t enough, they say leeches jump from the trees. They say that there are cases of malaria, and that dysentery is common. The wet season brings a persistent mold. There is precipitous terrain (teacher falls 20 feet and breaks hip), bad roads (cars plummet), false trails that will lead a wanderer astray (a group of boys lost for fourteen days; two dead). The doctor told us of ghost villages where the bears have taken over, eating the crops that the people no longer harvest.

What a great time to be alive and in Bhutan, for The East still exists and there are tales that strike fear. At home in Denver I was afraid; Bhutan was too foreign, too remote. I was growing content, complacent perhaps. Now I am even more terrified, that wonderful terror that I made a commitment to long ago: “Do what terrifies you.” My fear has stoked a fire and the tales of The East are a bellows, feeding that fear and turning it red hot. And here I am, a three days journey away.

To The East. To The East. To The East.